Called to account

A sadistic war criminal finally brought to justice, they say. A victim of Western double standards, he retorts. Zlata Filipovic and Iason Athanasiadis discuss why the Milosevic trial is more than a strictly Balkan affair
Vukovar, Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Pristina, Trnopolje, Racak. These are names that have become synonyms of Balkan bloodshed and human pain. Places that have echoed to the brutal rhythm of rape, torture and mutilation. Last week, the trial of the man who headed the former Yugoslavia's hierarchical pyramid at the time of the atrocities, Slobodan Milosevic, began at the United Nations' international war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Beyond an attempt to call a suspected war criminal to account, the trial marks the highest profile effort to apply international law to armed conflicts everywhere.
"This tribunal, and this trial in particular, give the most powerful demonstration that no one is above the law or beyond the reach of international justice," said Carla Del Ponte, the combative chief prosecutor who has worked unstintingly over the past few years to bring Milosevic before international justice.
But Milosevic, a trained lawyer who has refused to appoint a legal team, relying, instead, on legal advisers such as Jacques Verges -- famous for defending Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie and Carlos the Jackal -- quickly turned the tables on the court. After listening impassively for two days while prosecutors outlined their case, Milosevic hit back by saying, "You basically have nothing, and that is why you have to concoct things, you have to invent things.
"Serbs don't believe in the justice system of The Hague. The Hague is not interested in what Milosevic did for Serb people," he snarled while delivering his opening statement. Presiding judge Richard May, who has not so far flinched before turning Milosevic's microphone off in mid-speech, watched as the defendant went on to perform a four-hour-long soliloquy of self-justification. In deigning to address the tribunal, whose legitimacy he claims to reject, Milosevic has revealed that his rhetorical flourishes -- even the apparently sincere belief in his own upstanding conduct -- are all tactical manoeuvres intended to release him from the charges he faces.
Just such a tactical manoeuvre appears to have been his repeated efforts at linking the trial and the events to which it relates to the current US-led war on terrorism, as underlined by his references to Muslim- majority Kosovo as having been a hotbed of Al-Qa'eda activity. He has demanded the immediate arrest of former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former NATO commander Wesley Clarke because "they had deep-rooted connections with terrorists," referring to tacit US support of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). And, in denying the tribunal's legitimacy -- even while participating in its workings -- Milosevic argued that, "This court is illegal because it is financed through donations by, for example, Saudi Arabia, which also finances international terrorism."
Milosevic brushed off the 66-count indictment against him as "an ocean of lies" and dismissed the proceedings as a "show- trial" directed against all Serbs. He seems to be displaying the political trait he knows best -- avoiding the negative consequences of his own actions. A good tactician but a bad strategist, the former Yugoslav president was, from early days, a Communist party apparatchik who was prompt in executing orders from his superiors and never became too prominent, even when he had ascended to the top of the power structure. Milosevic's reliance on others, such as warlords Arkan and Vojislav Seselj, to do the dirty work for him goes far in explaining why The Hague may have greater difficulty in proving his culpability through examining de facto examples of his involvement in the massacres, rather than trying to find de jure instances of guilt. As Vidosav Stevanovic argues in a forthcoming biography of the Serbian leader, Milosevic's main motivation was maintaining his grip on power and he guaranteed this by balancing off the power of the army with oral agreements he had with paramilitary leaders and draping his actions in nationalist rhetoric.
Beyond the eloquence and hyperbole, Milosevic also addressed some of the charges against him. He rejected that Serbia was involved in fomenting war in Croatia and Bosnia and alleged that the mass exodus of 800,000 refugees from Kosovo in 1999 was due to the KLA's depredations and the NATO bombing campaign. In illustrating his assertion that NATO bombings were indiscriminate or, worse, vindictive, he held up several graphic photographs depicting the on-the- ground carnage. He alleged that in Kosovo his forces had been fighting terrorists, just like the Americans in Afghanistan, and professed amazement that it was considered acceptable for the US to fight a campaign against terrorism halfway round the world but not for him to eliminate them in his backyard.
As regards committing atrocities, Milosevic gave prosecutors hungry to establish a direct link in the chain of command between himself and the soldiers carrying out the massacres on the field little cause for celebration, stating, "I'm not saying that some individuals did not do this (massacres), but the police and army defended the country courageously and honourably. It is the Serb tradition, and the tradition of the Serb military, that a prisoner of war, an unarmed person, is held sacred. Whoever violated this sacred principle has to be held accountable. However, this was not done by the military or by the police. Such dirty crimes cannot be the crimes of an army, a people a nation a country, their government."
In a shrewd move aimed at drawing a line between regular troops -- those under his command -- and paramilitaries, Milosevic said that the former "defended their country honourably and chivalrously," while the latter "go and loot and burn and kill." Milosevic, who mainly depended on shadowy paramilitary units such as the ones led by the infamous Arkan to carry out his dirty work, is hoping that their irregular status will have sufficiently blurred the connection between them and himself, allowing him the opportunity now to convince the court that there really was no direct chain of command from him to those responsible for atrocities.
Wearing the Yugoslav national colours of red, white and blue, Milosevic has tried to promote the impression that he is the embodiment of the Serb nation, implying that this, far from being a trial against one individual, is targeting a whole nation, "Our citizens stand accused, citizens who lent their massive support to me," he declared. "My conduct was an expression of the will of the people." He sought to weave a paranoid conspiracy theory whereby the Serbs, victims of a US-backed resurgent Germany "which was to be master of Serbia in order to advance its ambitions to the east," would be subjected to genocide. "The whole world knows that this is a political trial and it has nothing to do with law whatsoever," he repeats, punctuating this statement with, "I can look anyone in the eye -- I defended my country honourably and chivalrously."
Milosevic's performance has earned him few plaudits from trial-watchers. "Creative, yet predictable," is how one, Mary Adele Greer of the Coalition for International Justice, described Milosevic's performance. "The [Serb] public is his jury -- he's obviously appealing to their sentiments, and to get them on his side."
Back in Belgrade, the trial's proceedings are being followed avidly. In a country where people crowded night after night onto bridges and other likely targets over the course of the NATO bombardments in a bid to protect the national infrastructure, the current trial is being widely interpreted to be another invasion of national sovereignty. Milosevic is partly to blame for this perception. His people simply do not know what actions he carried out in their name, while the Kostunica-led multi-party alliance currently in power has other things to worry about, such as the parlous state of the economy.
One of the hallmarks of the Milosevic regime was the manipulation of the media, the co-opting of the intelligentsia and the state's ability to blur peoples' minds with propaganda. These were the main contributing factors to why a big part of the Serbian populace cannot fathom that their former president is on trial for any reason other than that the West has a personal vendetta against them. Typical of this is the case of Ranka Prcic who, over the course of the conflict in Bosnia, was desperately trying to find out what conditions were like in Sarajevo, where her parents were trapped. Not only was there little coverage of what was going on a few miles to the south on the state-controlled news, but Ranka did not find out about conditions in the Bosnian capital until she fled to Paris two years later.
"I'm furious at the lack of guilt that friends of mine in Belgrade feel at what happened and their government's role in it," complains 21-year-old Masa, a Montenegrin student currently finishing a degree at Oxford. "The only reason why Milosevic was removed from power was for economic reasons, because people could not endure living in such conditions. His fall from power was not because his people took a brave anti- nationalist stand."
The survivors of Milosevic's nationalist wars will be marking, this April, a decade since the dismembering of Sarajevo started. For them, the world seems to have forgotten the images and stories of Sarajevo, the buses filled with orphaned infants, the football fields turned cemeteries, the devastated buildings, the wounded and the dead. That one of the men held responsible for the horrors is on trial does not change anything that has happened -- but it does bring closer the possibility of establishing the truth.
Filipovic's account of life in wartime Sarajevo, Zlata's Diary, was an international bestseller translated into 30 languages. She is currently translating a biography of Milosevic for a British publisher
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